The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai Page B

important now than this ‘confidence and calm’ and that ‘sweet sense of peace’, these messages of happiness that now rose from every nook and cranny of her body and rippled merrily through her. What did it matter that the ‘fat circus manager’ kept nagging him so long for ‘the customary local licence’, what did she care that the chief recognized ‘a gentleman from top to toe’ in the elegant though slightly fishy-smelling figure of the director of the world-famous company, and holding ‘an unopened bottle of Szeguin’ in his hand, extended his attention, as befitting a guardian of law and order, to suggest the assurance of some modest police presence (and that the request for such be tendered in writing) so that the three-day visiting performance be conducted without any let or hindrance, when she was just beginning truly to feel that everything was bound to lose significance once ‘the body began to speak’, and that there was nothing more delightful and elevating than the moment when thigh, tail, breast and groin desire nothing but to drift gently and smoothly into sleep? So satisfied did she feel that she confessed to him that she no longer needed him, and so, after he had several times ventured beyond the warmth of her eiderdown and shrank back in again, she sent the chief on his way with a few words of sound maternal advice regarding ‘the orphans’, watching him pass through the door into the freezing cold and thinking of him, if not precisely with love—for she had always dissociated herself from such romantic literary nonsense—then at least with a certain pride, then, having exchanged her seductive baby-doll for the warmer flannel nightgown, she slipped back into bed at last to enjoy ‘her well-earned sleep’. Using her elbow, she smoothed out the sheet where it had rucked up under her, dragged the eiderdown back over her with her feet, then, turning first on her left side then her right, found the most comfortable position to lie in, pressed her face into the soft warmth of her arm and closed her eyes. She was a sound sleeper, so after a few minutes she quietly nodded off, and the occasional jerking of her feet, the rolling of her eyeballs under their thin lids and the ever more regular rising and falling of the eiderdown were accurate indicators that she was no longer properly aware of the world about her, that she was drifting further and further from the present enjoyment of naked power which was rapidly diminishing but would be hers again tomorrow, and which in her hours of consciousness whispered that she was mistress of her poor cold possessions and that their fate depended on her. The washbasin no longer existed, neither did the untouched glass of bicarbonate; the wardrobe, the clothes-rack and the stained towel thrown into a corner, all disappeared; floor, walls and ceiling had no more meaning for her; she herself was nothing but an object among objects, one of millions of defenceless sleepers, a body, like others, returning each night to those melancholy gates of being which may be entered but once and then with no prospect of return. She scratched her neck—but she was no longer aware of doing so; for a moment her face contorted into a grimace—but it was no longer aimed at anyone in particular; like a child crying itself to sleep she gave a brief sob—but it no longer carried meaning because it was only her breath seeking a regular pattern; her muscles relaxed, and her jaws—like those of the dying—slowly fell open, and by the time the chief had negotiated the severe frost, got home and thrown himself fully clothed beside the sleeping forms of his two sons, she had already penetrated to the dense core of her dream … In the thick darkness of her room it seemed nothing stirred: the dirty water in the enamel basin was preternaturally still, on the three hooks of the clothes-rack, like great sides of beef above a butcher’s counter, hung her sweater, her raincoat and a